This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
31–40 of 359 posts
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#32I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…
I presume "GPL" was an autocorrect from the intended "GPT" right?
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#33I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…
I presume "GPL" was an autocorrect from the intended "GPT" right?
Correct, it was a typo
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#34I've been using https://search.brave.com for a few weeks. Most of the time I find what I need.
Their news scroll is also better than average.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#35I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…
Typically Google has a warming/trial period for new large content sites, after their search bot is introduced to the content and has spidered its way through the site.
For example there used to be a very common content farm system, that was structured like like this:
https://domainsites.com/site/nytimes.com
So when people searched for sites by domain name, the zillions of low traffic long-tail results of this farm system would be all over Google's results.
What it would present on the page is a mess of data about nytimes.com, such as traffic, or keywords pulled from the site header, maybe a manufactured description (or pulled right from the site head), sometimes images / screenshots of the site. Anything that could be stuffed in there to fill up enough content to get Google to not do an automatic shallow content kill penalty on the content farm. This worked for several years very successfully until Google's big algorithm updates, 9-10 years ago or whatever now (Penguin et al.). You could just build a large index of the top million domains (eg Alexa and Quantcast used to provide that index in a zip file), spider & scrape info from the domains, and build a content farm index out of it and have a million pages of content to then hand off to Googlebot.
So initially such a farm will boom into the search rankings, Google would give them a trial period and let out the flood gates of traffic to the site. Then Google would promptly kill off the content farm after the free run period expired and they had figured out it was a garbage site.
I still occasionally see this model of content farm burst up into traffic rankings, and it's usually very short lived. It makes me wonder if that's not more or less what's going on with the Mermaid farm.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#36> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this. Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
The problem is that paywall sites already do this: Google sees the article, others see a paywall.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#37The last time I accidentally installed malware on my computer was when the top Google result pointed me to a site masquerading as the official site for the software. That thought me a lesson to pay attention to the domain name.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#38Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are…
I noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#39Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
This exactly. I’ve been researching specific house repair issues and just get nothing but content spam. Whenever I want specific information I find myself adding “reddit” to the query string, which will usually turn up a thread with links out to the actual answer.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#40This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?
Yes, and more non-spam email is getting filtered as spam. Also, a mailing list I was unable to unsubscribe from and marked as spam at least 5 times kept being delivered to my inbox.